


Blood and Bone

by Geonn



Category: Original Work
Genre: Artificial Intelligence, Engineers, F/F, Holography, Isolation, Masturbation, Outer Space, Reading Aloud, Romance, Science Fiction, Spaceships, Survival, Voyeurism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-29
Updated: 2013-10-31
Packaged: 2017-12-30 21:06:04
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 16,354
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1023382
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Geonn/pseuds/Geonn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When her ship is overtaken by pirates, an engineer takes emergency measures to salvage the ship's artificial intelligence while evading their enemies.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Cinah hurled herself through the hatch, grabbing the loop of rope to change her trajectory through the core. The heat from the gel sacks that clung to its inside walls passed over her as she skipped weightlessly through the center of the tube. Her boots skipped off one flat level; it would be inaccurate to call it the floor as there was no floor in this part of the ship. There was no up or down, no pull of gravity, nothing to orient herself. The core was the central hub of the Scatter, the source of its propulsion and the central housing for the majority of their tech. 

“Tinker Bell, you listening?”

“I’m here.”

Cinah steadied herself on a platform, knees up near her shoulders, and scanned the screens around her. “Captain asked for an extra burst of speed. Thinks we can get away from the salvagers if we just juke ‘em a little bit. Think you can give that to me, sweets?”

A pause. “I’ll require energy.”

“Divert it from...” She stretched out and tapped a screen, quickly scanning the options.

Tinker saw it before she did. “Sectors Eight and Twelve.”

Cinah smiled. “Aye.” She moved the microphone down from her temple mount. “Captain, alert everyone in Eight and Twelve they need to relocate. Nine and Thirteen have room. We’re going to be diverting energy from there to give you the burst you want.”

Her words were translated to text on his monitor, and his reply came back to her across the screen she was using. “Two minutes.”

She would need three just to reach the proper station, so she pushed off the wall and let herself tumble-fly through the weightless environment she called home. At the far end of the tube was a chamber she called her room. At the opposite end was the massive engine that propelled them through the ether. And in between was a nearly four-hundred foot stretch of screens, gears, pistons, switches, levers, gel sacks, and other sundry items that kept the twenty-eight sector ships anchored to it from losing power. It was the beating heart of the Scatter, and Cinah was its cardiologist.

There were three engineers on each sector who served under her, but the core was only large enough for one person. If they tried to fit another into the tube they would be forever colliding and getting in each other’s way, and nothing would get done. That was why every Core Diver received a Live Interface Avatar. Most called their avatars LIA, but Cinah called hers Tinker Bell after a fairy in a classic story. The artificial intelligence served as a buffer for the copious information being sent from the Scatter to the Core. It decided what was vital and what could be shuffled into buffering systems. The LIA saved the Core Diver from being inundated by every single alarm and request from the orbiting ships. 

The temple mount that stored the LIA hard drive was a metal strip that curved along the temporal line of her skull. She’d had to shave her head for the implantation, decided she liked how it looked, and now she kept herself as close to cue-ball as possible. The mount gave her unfettered access to the mainframe of each Scatter ship so she could contact any of them with little more than a thought.

Due to the central nature of the core, she didn’t have the luxury of gravity. There was a weighted space generator in her chambers so she wouldn’t have to lash herself to the wall in order to sleep. She preferred the freedom of weightlessness. She wore a tan suit with a retractable helmet in case of emergency which was currently withdrawn down into a thick collar that hung around her neck like a yoke. Her tools were in a bag that was slung across her torso and hanging underneath her right arm. 

She hooked her fingers on the lip of the next segment and pushed herself up to the station. She entered her codes and checked the time to make sure she wasn’t going to prematurely suffocate anyone by cutting off their power. The microphone was still down so she spoke to the captain.

“I’m in position to transfer power. Status of the bogey?”

His text display appeared seconds later. “Scavengers dropping back. May be.”

Cinah furrowed her brow. Even if he’d intended to say “maybe,” the message seemed cut off. “Repeat message, sir?” She waited fifteen seconds for a reply, checked her time stamp, and saw it had been more than two minutes. Everyone on the Scatter was well-trained; one hundred and twenty seconds was more than enough warning to get to safety. She entered the code and the map showed two sections going dark. Then a third. And a fourth.

“Tinker, show yourself.” 

The pale blue avatar appeared beside her. The image was an illusion created by the optics at the back of her eye, visible only to her. It didn’t reflect in the screens but she was well-accustomed to that bit of unreality by now. 

“What did I do?”

“You did nothing. The Scatter is distressed. Sectors Eighteen, Twelve, Three, Four...”

Twelve, Cinah realized, was where she had just evacuated a sector. Those people had run from her shutdown and found themselves in a lifeless pod. She was gripped with guilt, but she touched the temple mount and felt a relieving flood of painkillers. It muted her emotions just enough that she could focus on the largest catastrophe.

“The scavengers. They’re attacking.”

“It would appear thus.”

Cinah turned and propelled herself forward. “Prepare for bounce!” She reached the panel and placed her bare feet against the wall, bending toward the glass and authorizing the power to the engines. When nothing happened she felt a tightness on the right side of her head near the temple mount. “Tinker, we have to go...”

“The system is compromised. If we activate the engines now the Scatter will rip apart. The core will shoot away and leave the sectors behind, defenseless and adrift.”

Cinah grunted and pushed off with the balls of her feet. “How long do we have?”

“Reports of boarding parties on Sector Twenty.”

“Damn. Disconnect from Sector Twenty, Twenty-one and Nineteen.” She felt the zap as the order was followed. The scavengers didn’t create their own technology; they stole from everyone they could pin down long enough to tear apart. Uneducated simpletons testing and experimenting with alien technology meant that a lot of the scavengers managed to blow themselves up, but others were only poisoned or damaged by the tech. The ones who survived were reckless and more than half crazy, but they were smart. She could feel their attempts to hack into the mainframe, but Tinker managed to keep the firewalls up.

“Countermeasures?”

“Enacted.”

The core shifted and Cinah was hurled against one side of the tube. “ _Wangbadan_!” She had avoided a head injury but her shoulder ached as she pushed her toes off the wall and grappled for the nearest screen. The information was bordered by a flashing red line to indicate the utmost urgency, and she soon saw why. Communications were cut off, and they were down to twelve dark sectors. The alarms were now in her head, the temple mount channeling every distress signal into her mind because there was no other outlet. The filter couldn’t differentiate, so it was flooding past the LIA to her mind.

“Tinker!”

“Boarding parties in every sector, Cinah. They are all attempting to access my systems.”

It couldn’t be allowed. If the scavengers got their hands on an AI, it could conceivably give them access to every piece of Earth technology they’d ever acquired. The only thing keeping the damned pirates at bay was the fact they occasionally blew up their own ships, so the thought of them acting competently was enough to fill her with dread.

“They can’t have you.”

“I will scuttle my drives.”

“That will destroy you. I won’t allow that.”

Tinker said, “It’s the only way.”

“No.” She tapped the screen rapidly, entering codes that ever Core Diver learned but never expected to employ. Tinker’s avatar leaned forward to observe, an affectation since it was seeing everything through the sensor in Cinah’s right eye. “You...”

“The Scatter is already lost. We can’t surrender you to them as well.” She disconnected the links between the Core and every sector. The temple mount warned her that she had just gone dark, and she slapped the implant to silence it as she twisted and moved to a different station. Tinker had said that bouncing would separate them from every ship in the Scatter. Before that had been unimaginable, to abandon their people that way. But now... now their people were lost. Staying would only result in the scavengers getting everything they’d ever hoped for.

Tinker said, “This has happened before. Core Diver training tells you the only possible course of action is to destroy the AI. You cannot risk the scavengers getting their hands on it.”

“It’s never happened to you. And I won’t let them take you,” Cinah whispered. “You have my word, Tinker Bell. Visual mode off.”

She activated the engines and slipped her hands through the ropes to brace herself for the thrust. The core was thrown askew just before the engines activated and she knew her trajectory had just been destroyed. Her legs dangled as if she was gripping the ceiling, then she just as quickly fell flat as if the wall had become the floor. She tumbled and rolled and jumped and fell all without moving as the core was battered through the vacuum.

The klaxons quieted as they were severed from their source, each sector of the Scatter going completely silent and therefore not worth the distraction. After a few seconds the core was completely silent, and Cinah held her breath as if the atmosphere had been sucked out of the ship. She felt like a pebble inside of a tin can being shaken by a malevolent little kid... her sister had done that with a cockroach, actually. Apparently karma was too stupid to know it had gotten the wrong twin.

“Approaching planetary body,” Tinker reported. “Estimated impact in seventy-nine seconds at current velocity.”

The temperature inside the core increased dramatically, beads of sweat appearing on Cinah’s upper lip and the rest of her exposed skin. The friction against the atmosphere tore off the small dish satellites and loose items that covered the shell of the core, and she heard the clatter and scrape as each bit of flotsam was blown across the face of her home-turned-projectile. Tinker began a countdown in her head as Cinah reached up and tapped the implant for an instant injection of Fade. The drug flooded her brain and her eyes rolled back in her head, her body going limp as the artificial gravity failed and she was tossed around like a puppet in the planet’s true gravity.

The impact was enough to shatter her bones, every single one of them, even if she hadn’t already been in a fragile state from prolonged weightlessness. Fortunately her skeleton had been fortified for just that reason, and she felt the tremble as bones that should have snapped merely vibrated painfully in their sockets. She was forced to release her grip on the ropes and went tumbling through the length of the core. She slammed into monitoring stations, shattering screens with her back and feeling sharp-edged metal tearing into her flesh.

The core finally came to a stop and she hit the side that was now her floor, the side that was undeniably “down.” Blood dripped and trickled, and she felt the weight of an environment pressing down on her from all sides. She shuddered and gasped at the shock to her system, then reached up and touched her implant. “Tinker, report.” There was no response, not even an ocular readout, and she panicked. “Tinker Bell. Report.”

“Assessing damage,” Tinker said in a flat voice. “It is considerable.”

“I imagine.” She assessed her own damage, wincing as she sat up and applied pressure to the wound in her side. “Visual mode.”

“I don’t have the available memory for that process as yet. Estimated time of recovery, one hour.”

Cinah grunted and pushed herself onto her hands and knees. Her limbs trembled under her weight until she was able to pull herself up, leaning against the wall for support as she did an internal inventory. Nothing broken, just a few scrapes and cuts. Nothing terribly deep. She would either need stitches or wear scars, and she could deal with either option.

“Tinker. Speak to me. Tell me anything.”

“Atmosphere is ideal for life. Temperature is optimum. We...”

The voice cut off so suddenly that Cinah nearly panicked. “Tinker? Tinker, respond.”

“The scavengers charted your course. They are en route and shall arrive within ten minutes.”

“ _Gouzaizi_...”

“Language, Cin-cin.”

Despite herself, she smiled at the admonishment. “Apologies to your sensitive nature, Tinker. Options?”

“We have none. I will commence destroying my hard drive, and you will be stranded here. The outcome is the same but you are alone on an alien world rather than taken prisoner.”

Cinah knew what would have happened if she was taken captive by the scavengers; an engineer would either give up the secrets of tech or have it tortured from her mind. If she refused to share her brain, the scavengers would find a multitude of unseemly things to do with her body. Either way she would have been a very valuable pet until she was squeezed dry. It wasn’t a fate she intended for herself.

“And you? You’ll die.”

“I never lived.”

“Semantics.” She limped forward, formulating the plan as she went. She swung her bag around, her body already acclimating to the fact she could walk and stand. There were tools in the bag that she would no longer need, and she left those in her wake like so much jetsam. “Give me an ETA on the scavengers. I need it exact as you can make it.”

“They will arrive in nine minutes, forty-two seconds. Estimating the time necessary to pinpoint the crash site and prepare a ground force, they will be here in twenty-seven minutes and eight seconds.”

“Half hour,” Cinah whispered. She knelt beside the main hub, the brain of the core, and used her mag-wrench to loosen the bolts. “I can manage that. It won’t be pretty, but I’ll take what I can get. Cut wide, take a little bit more than necessary, yeah. Yeah, it’s doable.”

“What in the two Earths are you doing?”

“Saving your damn life. Quiet.”

Tinker said, “I’m a program.”

“Don’t make me mute you.” She put the spanner in her mouth, holding it with her teeth as she slid both arms deep into the bowels of the machine. She knew her way around by touch, grunting as she felt the perimeter of the LIA hub. She pulled her left arm out, found the right tool in her belt, and reached in again. 

“You are not acting in your best interest. A half hour head start is nothing, but it will still afford you a chance. You are wasting valuable time.”

“And you are distracting me with your prattle. So be silent or help me.”

Tinker sighed, another human trait she had adopted from Cinah. “You are hopeless.”

“Wrong. I am full of hope. I brim with hope so that it overflows from my eyes.”

A schematic was projected on the wall in front of her and she saw her own hands deep inside the wall. She smiled but didn’t gloat, focusing on the task at hand. Tinker was right. Twenty-seven minutes was a weak head start, but it was something. She was down to twenty-five now, maybe less. She could run, she could find a burrow and hide, and she could leave Tinker behind the scorch the ship before a scavenger got their grimy hands on it. Her entire crew had died, why should she and Tinker be any different.

“Because we are,” Cinah growled, ignoring the fact she’d switched from an internal monologue. “We are here and alive, and we have a chance. I will not lie down and give up.”

“Cinah...”

“Don’t talk me out of it.”

“I wanted to say thank you.”

Cinah closed her eyes.

“I know that many... any other engineer or Core Diver would have simply burned my hardware at the first sign of danger. Many LIA units have been lost in false alarms, and others have been justifiably burnt. I do not know why you are doing this, going to these extremes, but I want you to know I am... I am... very... glad... that you are.”

“The words you’re looking for, Tink,” she grunted, “are ‘thank you.’”

“Yes.”

“You’re welcome.”

Another few minutes of strenuous work resulted in the hub being pulled loose. Tinker Bell gave a startled gasp as she was separated from the ship. Cinah pulled it free and examined the oblong piece of electronics. It was jet black with streaks of pale blue to show its seams. Inside was a complex nest of wires and diodes, all sorts of tech that was above even her pay grade. She couldn’t build an LIA if her life depended on it, but she could keep one running. She hoped that would be enough.

The blue lights dimmed slightly, and she looked up to see the visual interface hologram was dim as well. “Tink? Are you hurt?”

“I... n-no. No, I just feel slightly adrift.”

“My temple mount is supposed to manage an entire Scatter’s worth of input. Right now it’s operating at, what, ten percent normal?”

Tinker Bell said, “One-point-eight.”

“Blazes,” Cinah said. “Well, then, more than enough. Transfer your base to my mount. Ride in there until we can get you installed in a new core.”

“Are you certain?”

“I’m not going to be needing the extra space any time soon.” She wiped the blood off her hands as she transferred the hub into her bag. She hooked the strap over her head, letting it fall across her chest so that the bag was tucked safely against her right side. She got to her feet and tried to remember which end of the core had the exterior access hatch. 

“Come on.”

Tinker followed her even though it wasn’t strictly necessary; she could simply have changed her position in the blink of an eye, but she enjoyed the sensation of actual movement. Cinah stopped to put on her boots and lift her hood so it would shade the top of her bald head, shut down the elements that hadn’t gone dark when she pulled out the LIA, and took one last look around. Finally she muscled open the hatch and pushed it out, gasping as the heat washed in. She glared over her shoulder at Tinker. 

“Temperature optimum?”

“There have been billions of humans who strive in environments far harsher than this.”

Cinah rolled her eyes. “I already regret saving you.”

“Shall I begin self-termination procedures?”

“Oh... shut up.” She crawled out onto the hard-pack sand, straightening up to scan the horizon. Mountains. She thought she saw a few lakes between the crash site and the range, but that could have just been the light playing tricks on her eyes. She checked to make sure she had her water, tapped her temple mount to get a heads-up display of the conditions, and took a deep breath.

“How long until the scavengers get here?”

“Sixteen minutes. They are currently in orbit, scanning for the crash site.”

Cinah nodded. “Okay. Sixteen minutes.” She started walking. “Let’s see how far we can get.”

#

Core Diver Cinah Tesser, third in her class of seven. Not wholly remarkable, hardly a washout. She stood proudly at the assignment ceremony in her red and black dress uniform, her head not yet shaven. Long black hair hung in a tight braid that ended just above her hip. Her right hand was balled in the small of her back, the other rested in the center of her chest, and she spoke the Oath in a chorus of seven. When it was completed, the provost applied medallions to their chests that indicated they had achieved graduation. Provost Thea Barrinan shook the valedictorian’s hand before she added an assignment to his pin. The name of the ship was read out loud, but Cinah didn’t need to hear it to know he’d gotten the flagship. He’d earned the honor over and over again, and she was happy for him. The salutatorian was assigned to the Del’veen, which made sense. Her highest marks were in strategic thinking and combat situations. 

Barrinan stepped in front of Cinah and their eyes locked as they gripped palms. Cinah smiled, and Barrinan did her best to offer a neutral expression in return. Not that the provost had ever been capable of that, not since the night they ran into each other in the bar. The instructor had seemed smaller somehow, her uniform exchanged for a white all-purpose shirt under a leather jacket. Cinah was just drunk enough to make a game out of seducing her, ignoring her friends’ arguments that Barrinan was yix and didn’t sleep with females, let alone females who were students, let alone student females half her age. 

Cinah proved them wrong on all counts.

Their affair lasted eight weeks, the majority of the third semester, and it ended only when the chancellor became suspicious. Their separation was amicable, but Cinah had taken it harder than she expected. Holding Thea’s hand again, even with the barrier of their gloves between the skin, was more painful than she expected.

It was not too painful, however, for her to misunderstand her assignment. “The Scatter.”

The second and fourth in her class both turned their heads to look at her, and she felt as if the air had been sucked out of the room. “There must be a mistake, ma’am.”

“Serve with pride, Core Diver Tesser.”

“Ma’am...”

Provost Barrinan moved on to the next student, who looked pale and terrified. The assignments became progressively worse for each student in the row, which indicated he would be assigned to a garbage scow or prisoner transport. Provost Barrinan gripped his hand and smiled, then spoke his assignment: “The Alacrity.”

Cinah gasped. The Alacrity was one of the finest ships in the fleet. Anyone paying even the merest attention would understand the slap in the face Cinah had just received. “That’s bullshit.”

“Stand silent, Code Diver.”

She opened her mouth to fight back, but she immediately understood there was no point. The only change to be made would be to demote her even further, and she had no intention in being the sole crewmember on a low-orbit scrubber. She forced herself to hold her expression as the rest of the assignments were given. Then she and her classmates turned to face the crowd to accept their applause. Provost Barrinan took the time to shake each student’s hand as they filed off the stage. She gripped Cinah’s hand harder than necessary.

“There are no bad postings, Core Diver Tesser.”

“No ma’am. Only petty people.”

Barrinan’s expression hardened as Cinah pulled her hand away and brushed past her. 

#

“What are you remembering?”

Cinah stopped on a rise and caught her breath for a moment. “Nothing in particular.” She had put on her goggles to combat the glare, the sand spilling across the toes of her boots as she tried to determine from which direction the scavengers would approach. “I guess I was thinking about the Scatter. I’m sad that it’s gone. Very sad. And I remember the first time I saw it and knew it was mine, and how I wanted to fly the whole damn thing into the sun.”

Tinker stopped a few feet to Cinah’s left. In the harsh sunlight, her aquamarine skin was faded to an almost human shade. There was a persistent rumor that all female LIA avatars were based off a real person back on Second Colony, but she had never been found. Cinah believed the far more rational story that she was a composite of certain feminine ideals. She had the eyes of Ardent Na-Xia, the glamorous actress from the forties, and the body of Claire Singh. She was not quite Oriental, not exactly Western, a mixture achieved by the subtle combination of both races. She was intended to be androgynous but the programmers were well aware that Core Drivers were adept enough to change the code as they saw fit. They named their LIAs, assigned them personalities, and usually managed to tilt the avatar to one side of the gender spectrum before their ships even left port. She wore the same unremarkable green uniform that all LIA avatars wore to differentiate them from human members of the crew.

The hub containing all of Tinker’s hardware was tucked safely in her bag. She rested her hand on the bulge it made in the canvas and said, “Any idea how much longer we have?”

“Not long,” Tinker said quietly. “I’ve been accessing the topography stored in my systems from the crash and I’ve discovered there is a small settlement approximately twenty-nine klicks in that direction.” She pointed away from the sun. “However, it is a very long trip in unforgiving conditions.”

Cinah nodded. “Okay. Is that sun setting or rising?”

“Rising.”

“Of course it is.” She adjusted the strap of her bag so it rested more comfortably against her shoulder. “All right. Let’s go.”

Tinker obediently fell in behind her, even though her feet didn’t actually leave imprints in the sand. “This is ludicrous, Cinah.”

“If I didn’t know better, I would say you sounded frustrated.”

“This is a losing battle. The best outcome you can hope for is imprisonment. If that occurs, the scavengers will get their hands on my tech anyway. You’ll be forced to destroy everything anyway. Carrying my hub will slow you down. This is madness, Cinah. Don’t sacrifice yourself for my sake.”

Cinah kept her eyes on the horizon, hazy though it was through the scratched plastic of her goggles’ lenses. “What makes you think I’m doing this for you?”

“Who else would you be doing it for?”

Cinah turned. “You. You, you stupid hallucination, you waste of light and projection, you _bai mu_! I’m doing it because the thought of losing you burns me up inside, all right? I don’t give a damn what the scavengers do to you, I can’t bear the thought of you dying.”

Tinker blinked at her. “Why?”

Cinah had tears in her eyes, grateful they were hidden behind her goggles. She’d been avoiding the truth, telling herself it was simply a matter of survival that she was trudging on. But there was really no reason for her to have gutted the machine, to be carrying the heavy hub along the desert when every moment and every inch gained could mean the difference between life and death. But now there was no avoiding it. She turned away and shook her head, smiling at her foolishness. “If you don’t understand, I can’t explain it.”

“You’re not making any sense. I cannot die because I’m not alive. Cinah...”

“Just shut up.”

“I’m weighing you down.”

Cinah adjusted the strap. “Just shut up, Tinker Bell.”

They walked on, and soon she heard disturbances in the air above their heads. She looked up and saw pale vapor trails that revealed their pursuers were on their way down to the planet. 

“How about a song?” she said as she began walking again. She wanted a soothing song, something she would listen to while they were in the gap between Point A and Point B. She wanted to feel like they were as far away from danger as possible. “Give me one off the traveling playlist.”

There was a moment as Tinker processed the request and then she began to sing. She spoke in multiple voices and carried the instrumentation as an undercurrent of her speech.

“The jewel of Nosi has carries a chalice  
To catch all the tears that would fall on her cilice  
Tho’ she carries a dreadful pain  
Fate decrees she will always remain  
A beauty to make gentlemen cry...”

“Cheerful,” Cinah muttered. “Give me a song by Jocia Sprinter.”

Another pause, and then Tinker began singing in a bouncy series of couplets as Cinah trudged onward through the desert. She had no idea the designation of the planet they were on, though it had to be somewhere in her cortex. She could ask Tinker to find it, but that would require multitasking, and she wasn’t sure the hub had that kind of energy left. She wasn’t sure about anything in regard to its life cycle. She knew it was finite, and she knew that she should turn off the visual interface to preserve power, but knowing Tinker was there was one of the only things that kept her moving forward. All she knew was that there was some kind of settlement ahead, and scavengers behind, and a lot of dry and empty desert in between. If she could reach the mountains before she was spotted from the air, she would have a chance. A small chance, yes, but a chance nonetheless. She hitched the strap higher on her shoulder and leaned into the wind, ignoring the sun that was making her sweat inside her suit.

“Tinker.”

“Yes, Cinah?”

“You don’t have to keep singing.”

Silence for a moment. “Does it make you feel better when I do?”

Cinah chuckled softly and nodded. “Yeah. Yes, actually, it does.”

“Then I see no reason to cease. ‘Johnny Butlee carried a rifle, surely, surely. Johnny Butlee carried a rifle and he used it poorly, poorly...’”

The avatar’s voice trailed off, and Cinah looked to make sure she was still there. “Tinker Bell? Did you forget the next verse? ‘Johnny’s on the ship, on the ship, Johnny’s--”

“No, I know all the words, Cinah.” She looked up at the sky. “You surely know what is waiting for you when they catch up with you. Your body will be forfeit, a tool for bargaining with. They will purchase your intelligence with pain. You will know relief only when you capitulate, when you betray your people.”

Cinah grunted. “We went through this all in Basic. When they try to make us wet our pants and wash out the weaklings. I know all about what the scavengers do to their prisoners. What’s your point?”

“I will make one last appeal. Destroy the hub and continue without me. Get to safety and protect yourself.”

“No.”

Tinker said, “Then thank you, Cinah.”

She stopped and looked at the avatar, glowing almost imperceptibly in the sun. “What?”

“There are currently ninety-three Core Divers in the fleet. In this situation, ninety-two of them would have deleted my files at the first sign of trouble. The harder you fight, the more I fear having myself eliminated in such a violent manner. To suddenly cease having awareness would be terrifying. Not that I would be aware of my terror. But I recognize that you are putting yourself through a much greater ordeal than necessary to protect me from that fate, and I would be remiss if I allowed it to go any further without saying... thank you.”

Cinah pressed her lips together and turned away again. “We’re not making any ground standing here jawing at each other. You were in the middle of a song.”

“Indeed I was. ‘Oh, Johnny’s on the ship, on the ship. Johnny’s on the ship and he’s riding off to war today-oh, today...’”


	2. Chapter 2

The Core Diver private quarters were oriented with an artificial gravity generator so that the core stretched out its full length beneath them. Entering the work space was therefore seen as diving in, hence the name of their profession. Cinah grudgingly reported for duty on the Scatter, a simple core vessel that trekked from one system to the next with a varying number of passenger and cargo ships tethered to its side. The size of the ship varied from point to point, depending on how many departed or joined up at each port. The power demands were stressful to manage, and the majority of engineers saw it as a punishment ship for troublesome cadets. To make matters worse, it was the only vessel in the fleet with a completely disconnected core, which meant any Core Diver assigned to it would spend nine to ten months without seeing another person.

Cinah grudgingly reported for duty as ordered, met with the crew of the Scatter’s only permanent ship and climbed into the place she already considered a cell of solitary confinement. Six months earlier she had undergone the procedure that removed part of her skull and replaced it with the interior works of the temple mount. Her eye was attached to a retinal network so she could see the LIA avatar, and so the heads-up display would be projected a few inches in front of her face. She’d dreamt of having the temple mount implanted, had often stroked the spot of her head as if it was just a placeholder for the tech that was supposed to be there. She practiced tapping the skin, readying herself for the day when there were actual controls there.

Now that she actually had it, the device was tied to the systems of the Scatter, and the cold metal felt like a shackle. She slipped feet first into the core, spun slowly as she descended, placing her hands on the walls to push herself. Soon she oriented herself to the lack of gravity and focused on the displays. The screens could be tilted and turned depending on which way she was facing, and she turned the nearest one so it read right-side up. 

“Activate LIA system, authorization Tesser-six-one-six-eight-grey.”

There was a quiet hum and then code began streaming across the screen. She slid the keyboard from its slot and began typing in strings of hack commands. She found the avatar’s program and nudged it a little in the right direction. If she was only going to see one face this year, it was going to be female. She finished programming and pushed the keyboard back into the wall.

“LIA, visual interface.”

The avatar flickered into view ahead of her, floating in a semi-fetal position. Her arms were curled up against her chest, her head tilted forward, and one knee bent up protectively near her chest. She spun as her form solidified, flexing and stretching much like a human being waking up and working out their tired muscles. Her eyes fluttered open, pale green without irises, and she turned to face Cinah.

“Hello. I am your Live Interface Avatar, but you may call me L--”

“Tinker Bell.” Cinah recalled the story from the fiction mist aerosoled over her bed as she slept. A small green fairy who only existed if belief in her was strong enough. Since no one else could see her avatar, it seemed apt even without the pale green glow of the projection.

The LIA seemed to consider the name for a moment, though Cinah knew she was merely altering her channels so that she would respond to the new designation. She dipped her chin when she was completed and said, “Very well. You may call me Tinker Bell.”

“Cinah Tesser.” She pushed off the wall and Tinker automatically appeared to move backward to avoid a collision. “Anything I should know about this place before we get started? How did the last Core Diver leave things?”

“Systems are all optimal. Core Diver Kaeai was a dedicated engineer.”

“Are you trying to make me jealous? Telling me about all the engineers you had before me?”

Tinker said, “I have no allegiance to one engineer over another. I have no capacity to feel more loyal to anyone in particular. Kaeai programmed me to be a male with an affinity for raunchy jokes.”

“Oh yeah? You remember any?”

“No. With each new Core Diver, I refresh my memory servers so there will be no overlapping personality issues.”

Cinah detached one of the access panels and gazed inside. “Does that mean you won’t care about me when I move on to my next assignment? Whenever that may be?”

“As long as you are assigned to this vessel, I will be as dedicated to you as I was to Kaeai. You have my word.”

“Well, just don’t forget me when I’m gone.”

“Of course not,” Tinker said. “I’ll retain a full record of your service to share with the Core Diver chosen to replace you.”

Cinah chuckled and pushed off the wall, letting her legs drift out behind her as she busied her hands inside the console. “Works for me. How about I start replacing some of those raunchy jokes? You like music, Tinker? Like to sing?” She grimaced as she struggled with a particularly tight bolt. “How about this one? ‘We stand on the strange shoreline, we face out to sea with the wind at our backs, we feel the crash against our feet and we fight the urge to dive and swim...’” 

“That’s a Marasea ballad.” She paused to access the proper files and began singing in harmony. Cinah smiled as she worked; she had a feeling they were going to get along just fine. If she couldn’t have a ship she was proud of, at least she would have a companion whose company she enjoyed.

#

“The barometric pressure is dropping rapidly,” Tinker said, stopping her song mid-sentence as suddenly as if she had turned off a radio. Cinah, who had been so focused on their mountain destination, was startled and had to look around to see how far they had come. She saw large black clouds so heavy with rain that they seemed to be a solid mass of darkness beginning to overtake the mountains to the west.

“Scylla and Charybdis. How big do you figure this storm will get?”

“It’s massive. I don’t have my atmospheric sensors or available satellite information, but I would not like to be out in the open once it hits.”

Cinah rubbed her brow above the goggles. “Options are limited. Which do I have the best odds to survive?”

Tinker considered. “The storm. There is a chance you could reach shelter, but you must hurry.”

“Seems to be a day for it.” She put her hood up and pulled the bag tight against her stomach so it wouldn’t bounce as she ran. She chose a course that put her on a collision course with the storm. Tinker projected herself forward and scanned the ground as far as the sensors in her hub could reach. The sky darkened so quickly that Cinah risked a look back to see if a scavenger ship was blocking the sun, but it was only the cloud bank rising higher in a deceptively soft-looking pile. Thunder echoed across the mountain range, echoing through its stony valleys and producing a magnified roar as it spread out across the plain.

“Tinker! Shut down visual interface and transfer the energy to scanners. Find me a hole.”

The projection shut down and, though she had ordered it, she felt a twinge of panic at being suddenly alone in the desert. She held the hub a bit tighter against her body as the first fat droplets of rain splattered against her goggles. The land ahead of her suddenly split into a red grid, and a dotted line led off to her left in a wide curve. She followed the track as the world went monochrome from a flash of lightning, and seconds later she was momentarily deafened by a cacophony of thunder.

The deluge began, less a downpour than a sideways spray of water. It slickened her face and soaked her uniform, making it cling to her skin and forcing clumps of sand to form around her boots to make each step more difficult. Fortunately it only took a few seconds at an all-out run before the trail led her from sand so deep her boots sank with every step to an expanse of actual solid ground. Through the veil of water she saw that it was a shale outcropping that stretched like a piece of bone from the desert landscape. She reached the jagged edge and jumped down, crouching in the windblown sand that had gathered underneath. 

She crawled on her hands and knees until the overhanging stone protected her from the rain. She rolled onto her back, fairly wedged between the hard top and the soft sand below, panting from her sprint so soon after being weightless. She loosened the strap of the bag and set it to one side, then began working the straps and fasteners of her uniform. She fought her way out of the jacket, then lifted her lower body to push the pants down. The sweat on her skin instantly cooled in the breeze blown into her cave by the rain.

Once the suit was off, Cinah unfastened her bag’s latches and peered inside. The hub glowed quietly, a benign piece of tech that held everything that made Tinker Bell exist.

“Tink, you there?”

“Energy stores are very low. I’m attempting to allocate more from reserves and shutting down unnecessary tasks. Approximate time necessary, ten minutes.”

Cinah rested her head against the stone, which still carried the heat it gathered before the storm. “That’s okay, Tink. Take your time.” She brought her knees up and put her arms around them. She closed her eyes and caught her breath. The storm would delay the scavengers as well. It would force them to remain in their landing craft, and they’d take the opportunity to dig through the guts of the core to see what she had left for them. They would be sorely disappointed, but they would have to examine everything. Their captain would punish them if they missed an opportunity.

The storm would also obscure her footprints, giving her another advantage, another chance to get away. Unless they’d spotted her on their descent they would have to send search parties in every direction to look for her. She rubbed her hands along the outside of her thighs, shivering now in her sleeveless undershirt and shorts. She curled her toes in the sand, grateful to be out of the uniform and her boots, and wiped the rainwater from her face as she settled in to ride out the storm.

#

She ran away from her father; she could never remember why, but she often found herself fleeing the old man in shame, in anger, in frustration, or just in her mercurial childishness. Often she was sobbing during these escapes, usually her face was bright crimson, and the crew was accustomed enough to it that they quickly got out of her way when she came pounding toward them. The time she visited in her dream, headachy from heat exposure and exhaustion, she wore a pink shirt with a flower on it, her skirts streaming out behind her like downward-facing leaves. 

Rounding a corner, she stopped short when she came across a pair of legs that didn’t move to get out of her way. She skidded to a stop and nearly fell down as she looked up to see who had impeded her tantrum. He seemed to have noticed her arrival at that moment and turned to look down at her, one corner of his mouth rising in a bemused smile. In the years since she would realize it had been a learned gesture. He had seen many crewmembers affect the same expression and merely copied it onto his own face in a situation that seemed to meet the right parameters. But at the moment it had been enough to stop her in her tracks long enough for him to speak.

“Hello.”

She sniffled up at him. 

“My name is Phero. What’s your name?”

“Cinah.”

“Cinah Tesser. Daughter of Ying, Rowena, and Azeem Tesser.”

She nodded and he crouched in front of her. “You seem distressed. Would you like to take a breath of fresh air in the arboretum? Or perhaps we could simply sit and you could regain control of yourself at your leisure?”

Again, he was only doing what he was programmed to do. His protocol saw her tears and her pain and he was going down a checklist of actions. If she’d said no, he would have just moved on down until he ran out of options. At that point he would simply pass her off to some human who would be able to discipline her or find some way to mollify her anger. But the idea of fresh air appealed, so she allowed the LIA to escort her to the vast green promenade of their habitat ring.

“Would you care to discuss your problem?”

She had. Saying the words out loud helped her understand where she was wrong and where her father was wrong as well. She sniffled and wiped at her cheeks as she recounted it as carefully as she could. Her father had warned her the LIA was very literal, that they could be confused by hyperbole and bare exaggeration, so she was forced to be fair to both sides of the argument. Pharo was tall and broad-shouldered, fashioned after an Egyptian designer who had died in the station’s construction. People moved out of their way as they walked. 

Eventually they found a curved bench where they could see the curved glass that made up the ceiling of the arboretum. Some people didn’t like that patch, since it ruined the illusion of being on Earth, but Cinah preferred it here. She liked knowing they were in space, that something this beautiful and elegant was possible out in the lifeless void. She sat next to Pharo with her hands folded in her lap, making a dent in the fabric of her dress as she swung her feet under the bench.

Since Pharo wasn’t really real, she could confidently tell him everything that she hated about her parents. It didn’t matter if her parents would be mad; they would never find out if she programmed him to secrecy when they were done. Better yet, she could erase details of the entire conversation from his memory banks so that he couldn’t reveal any secrets even if he wanted to. When she was done, her breathing was steady and she’d stopped crying. She felt calm enough to go find her father and apologize for the parts where she had been in the wrong.

Pharo scanned her face, and the elements seemed to add up to contentment. “Do you feel better?”

She assured him that she did, and he smiled. Not with pride or real gladness, but with the plain joy of a computer program that had operated within its assigned parameters. It had completed a task and would now move on to the next one. She told him their conversation was a secret and he nodded, pausing to lock the details away in a private file. 

In a few hours it would only remember meeting Cinah as part of its daily log when reporting activity aboard the ship. It didn’t truly care about her, no matter how realistic the smile seemed to her. But at that moment, it didn’t matter if Phero was real or not. He had listened, he had let her speak, and for a ten year old girl with the world against her... that was the most thrilling thing in the world.


	3. Chapter 3

“Cinah. I’ve been monitoring the storm system and I believe you may have an opportunity to continue moving soon.”

Cinah opened her eyes, refusing to admit she had been dozing. She sat up a little straighter and barely avoided bumping her head on the low, angled ceiling of her cave. She ran her mind back and replayed Tinker’s message again as she blinked her eyes into focus. “The storm is passing?”

“The worst of it seems to be over. There’s a chance it will redevelop overhead, but if you move quickly enough you can benefit from the cloud cover blocking the sun. The air is twelve degrees cooler behind the storm. If you leave now, your footprints stand the chance of being washed away, but if you wait until the weather passes...”

“I’ll be leaving footprints in mud. All right. If you say it’s safe to go, we go.” She gathered her things, opting not to put her suit back on. Instead she fashioned the top into a cape and folded the pants into a turban. She kept the gloves and boots as she crawled out into the downpour, the fat raindrops making a hollow thudding sound when it hit her cape. She adjusted her goggles, wiped the condensation from the lenses, and set out toward the settlement again.

“The situation appears dire, Cinah.”

“Oh, nonsense. We’ve been in far worse situations than this.”

Tinker was silent as she searched her records. Finally she came back with: “No.”

“Well, then. Look at the bright side. One day we’ll be in some horrible situation, and you’ll say we’re in deep, and I’ll say, ‘look at the bright side. At least we’re not shipwrecked in a desert with scavengers on our asses in the middle of a freak rainstorm with little hope of being rescued.’ We’ll have that, at least.”

“It seems that would be little comfort.”

“Sure. Now. But just wait.” She exhaled sharply as she crested the next ridge of sand, mud still clinging to her boots as she descended the other side. “Just wait. Next time we’re in trouble, it’ll be a cakewalk compared to this, and we’ll both feel a little better.”

Tinker said, “It is also unlikely. Cinah... should you survive this, you will be assigned to a new ship. That ship will come with its own avatar. I was designed for the Scatter and its systems. They will take me to a salvage yard and they will repurpose my tech for use in repairs and building new units. Regardless of what happens in the next few hours, I will not leave this planet intact. No matter how much you wish it so.”

Cinah slowed and let the rain pummel her. The wind whipped her cape around her, and she clutched the bag holding Tinker’s hub to her stomach as she considered the truth in what her friend was saying. She looked up and scanned the desert ahead of her. Where the rain had already stopped, meager rivers and pools shone in the sun like spilled mercury. 

“I won’t let that happen.”

“You can’t prevent it, Cinah. I can’t understand your refusal in this matter. You accepted the destruction of the Scatter without hesitation.”

“I’m not in love with the Scatter,” Cinah said quietly.

“I fail to see what affection has to do with this matter.”

Cinah resisted the urge to throw the hub across the dune. “I love you, Tinker. I have for a long time. That’s why I’m dragging your fucking hub across this desert, that’s why I’m going to find a way to put you into whatever ship I’m getting next. That’s why I’m fighting so hard to save your life.”

“I have no life to save, Cinah.”

Cinah sighed and started walking again. “You’re really gonna have to stop saying that, Tinker. It’s starting to piss me off.”

#

The ship was rocked by another blast, and Cinah wrapped the rope handhold around her wrist to free up her fingers. She ignored the orders being transcribed in the air in front of her, finally swiping them away with an angry gesture so she could focus on the task at hand. “We need more juice, Tinker Bell! Clap your hands and make it work!”

“I’ve read the file of the story you took my name from. You should clap your hands for me.”

“Semantics,” Cinah growled. She pulled at the framework, feet dangling behind her as she made a quick and dirty shortcut between two systems that shouldn’t be forced to work together. “If you’re not going to help, program a reminder for me. I need to disconnect that as soon as we’re safe or Sector 18 will explode the next time they file for upgrades.”

“Noted.”

Cinah released herself from the anchor and pushed herself forward. “Captain, we’re a go for the sloppiest bounce you’ve ever attempted.”

“You don’t know that. You haven’t seen my records.”

She grinned. “They think they were being cute surrounding us? Well, screw that. We’re going to light up a circle and then catch the scavengers in the blowback. We’re going up, over, and out. It’s going to fry their systems with an EM pulse and leave them dead in the water. It’s going to be a bit rough for us in the vacuum, though. Try to appreciate your art-grav holding you down.”

“You’re nasty, Cinah. I love it. Sending order to brace now.”

Cinah gripped two handholds and brought her knees up to her chest. She pressed her bare feet against the wall and ducked her head down. The countdown flashed in front of her even with her eyes closed, the red digits projected onto the darkness behind her eyelids. When it hit zero she was thrown violently to one side, nearly slipped out of the loops, and her feet went flying. The Scatter spun in a wide circle, its tail burning as it spiraled, and then accelerated away.

When they slowed enough for her to regain her bearings, she let her fingers glance off the side walls to propel herself back toward her quarters.

“No pursuit detected,” Tinker reported, “and all damage to the Scatter is minimal.”

As soon as she’d spoken, the captain’s report flickered across her vision confirming it. “Excellent work, Cinah. We’re lucky we had you here.”

“Just doing what any Core Diver would do, Captain.”

Tinker said, “That’s inaccurate. The plan you just enacted carried a forty percent chance that you would blow the engines and leave us defenseless to the scavengers. There was a mere sixty-three percent chance of success. In training, Core Divers are trained to never take action with less than eighty percent assurance.”

“Really? I must have missed that day.”

“You infuriate me.”

Cinah raised an eyebrow and looked over her shoulder. “Who taught you that phrase? You don’t get infuriated.”

“I’m merely echoing a phrase you have in the past used to express displeasure in my stubbornness. I believe I can understand the feeling now.”

“Glad to know I give as good as I get.” She pulled herself back up to the work-around she’d created. “Now, let’s see what we can do to prevent Sector 18 from blowing itself up...” As she began undoing the patchwork she’d done to save the ship, Tinker drifted out of view and disconnected visual mode since Cinah was focused on the tech. After a few seconds of silence, string music began playing softly through the ether.

It was a peace offering, a two-hundred year old classical tune and one of Cinah’s favorites. It took the old-old classics and successfully mated them with more recent music: the pounding beat of guitars from the twentieth century rock and roll effortlessly weaved through the more familiar wail of strings to create a gorgeous blend of eras. Cinah assumed it was Tinker’s way of congratulating her on a successful evasion, and she was grateful to her for it.

When she was finished, she requested permission to go off-duty. Verification came a few seconds later and she climbed back up to her chamber. Moving from the weightlessness of her workspace to the “heavier” air of her home. She pulled herself up and relaxed on the lip for a moment before she risked standing. She stripped out of her uniform, folded it carefully, and slipped it into the box that would send it up to be cleaned. She changed into a pair of underwear and a gray tank top before she settled into her hammock, feet crossed and hands resting lightly on her stomach.

“Tinker, lights to thirty percent, please.”

The lights in the core dimmed and she relaxed into the canvas of her bed. 

“Would you like me to continue the story from last night?”

“If you don’t mind.”

Tinker used to admonish her for saying things like that, implying that she had a preference, but had apparently learned it was a lost cause. So she searched her records for the book they were currently sharing and found the place where they had stopped the night before. 

“ **The settlement grew quickly in the first days. Carried across the winds came the scents of a brand new world, a world in which they could finally find their peace. Tensions on Earth - and she supposed they would have to differentiate between the two worlds, or change the name of one to avoid confusion - had mellowed since their departure, and people quickly understood that the Cleave had been the right choice all along. The world had become too crowded, its people holding too firmly to their own beliefs to allow anything else in. So like the ancient explorers they had set out for a new land to call home, setting sail propelled by solar winds upon waves made of cosmic dust.**

**Kathia Cooley left the campsite to scout through the woods nearby, hoping to rediscover the stream she had seen in their initial flyover. The day had been hotter than forecast, and she was sweating beneath her flight suit. She reached the gently-rolling waters and crouched on the muddy shore, letting the water pass over her fingers. It felt divine, like liquid fire, like burning cold. She brought her hand up and trailed it down her neck. The water trickled over her skin under the collar of her flight suit. She closed her eyes at how good it felt.**

**She unzipped the front of her flight suit and let her fingers trail lower. She touched the scooped neck of her shirt. She wet her fingers again and brought them to her chest. The water spilled beneath her shirt and between her breasts.** ”

Cinah’s hammock slowly swayed from side to side as she rocked herself, listening to the story with one hand idly stroking the scooped collar of her own shirt and imagining how good the water felt on skin baked in the sun. She had seen vids and photographs of Kathia Cooley, the heroic leader of the first expedition to humanity’s second colony, and the woman was devastatingly gorgeous. Long black hair, skin so pristine and pale it was almost gray. She left her hand on the swell of her breasts and moved her other hand across her hip. She’d read this book before, so she knew what was going to happen next.

“ **So distracted was she that the new arrival nearly went unnoticed. Braige Scott, her desperado of a missions officer, entered the clearing behind her. His teeth flashed in light reflected off the water as he moved to one side so as to create a buffer of space between him and his commander. Their relationship was terse but they admired each other professionally.**

 **Braige crouched in the mud and held his hands under the water, cupping them to his face, letting the water drip along his jaw and off the wide dimpled chin below his smirking lips. His hair, overlong and tangled, was black streaked with white. He unzipped the top of his uniform and ran his wet hand over his broad chest, washing away the sweat that had built up over the day.** ”

As Tinker continued to read, Cinah shifted position and moved two fingers beneath her underwear. She cupped her breast through her top and used a gentle back and forth motion of her hips to keep the hammock moving. She flattened her tongue against her bottom lip and pulled it into her mouth, worrying it with her teeth as she let her fingertips play over the folds of her sex.

“Are you in distress?”

It took Cinah a moment to remember that wasn’t part of the story. She kept her eyes closed and frowned. “Huh... no.”

“Your vital signs are spiking when they should be becoming more relaxed. If you require a medical consult, I could contact Dr. Wyatt--”

“No,” Cinah said, although the thought of the gorgeous Aussie doctor Addison Wyatt catching her with her hands down her pants was thrilling in its own way. “No, just... keep reading.”

“As you wish.”

“ **Also having built up over the day, and the weeks and the months of their traveling, Kathia was struck by the sight of her second’s bare chest and how the water illuminated his features. He raked his hair with curled fingers until it stood in spikes like a crown of thorns. He looked at her and she saw his eyes drop to the open collar of her uniform. She knew her chest must have shone like a beacon to him and understood that he had the same needs as she.**

 **Without one word exchanged, she stood and went to him. She grabbed a handful of his thick hair and pulled him to his feet, crushing his lips with a kiss before he could ruin the moment by speaking. Her hand still in his hair, she gripped the front of his belt and walked him backward to a tree. He grunted as he hit the bark, his mouth freed for sound when she moved to focus on his neck. His hands found her hips and pulled her to him, but she pointed the toe of one foot and bent her knee so she stayed where she wanted to be.** ”

“Cinah...”

“Just shut up,” Cinah whispered, her underwear twisted around the knuckles of her hand as she pushed two fingers into herself. “Read.”

“ **They grappled and Kathia stopped only to urge his hands away from the places she didn’t yet want them to be. She bit his bottom lip and he grunted, whether in passion or pain she didn’t care. She reached for the fasteners of his uniform and tugged them free. His prodder, small in length but generously plump, fell into her hand. She rubbed her palm against the tip until it began to harden, arching her back as he moved his head down to lick the moisture from her chest.** ”

There was a distinct but hard to define change as Tinker went from recitation to speech. “Cinah, are you certain you’re not in distress?”

“Activate visual mode,” she groaned. 

Tinker appeared next to the hammock and peered down at her. “Oh, I see. Self-gratification.”

“What did you expect, reading me that smut?” She chuckled breathlessly and watched Tinker watching her. “Well? Are you just going to stand there and watch or are you going to keep reading?”

Tinker tilted her head slightly to one side. “Shall... I disable visual mode?”

“Only if you don’t want to watch.”

Tinker remained still for a moment. She ran her eyes over Cinah’s body and then began speaking in the cadence of recitation again.

“ **Their clothing was quickly shed and tossed aside, and Kathia growled as she was lowered to the thick grass. It was soft against her skin. Braige knelt between her legs and pushed her down so that she was forced to give up her hold on his cock. It throbbed as he positioned himself, using his thick meaty fingers to curl around the base and guide--”**

Cinah cried out, arching her back as the hammock swung like a pendulum. “Don’t stop, Tink. Go, go.”

“ **Braige thru-- around the base and guide himself into her slick. She cut lines into his back with her blunt fingernails, lifting off the ground to meet... to meet... h-him... fully inside of her... bodies thrusting.** ” 

Cinah opened her eyes as she thrust against her own hand. Tinker stared at her in confusion, lips parted as if searching for the next word. “You can stop reading...”

“I lost my place,” Tinker said sheepishly, if she was capable of such an emotion.

“It’s okay. Just watch me.” She moved her hand faster, her other hand already under her shirt to caress her breast. She pinched her nipple and focused on Tinker’s face. “You’re gorgeous, you know...”

“If that is so, it’s only because you made me so.”

Cinah laughed breathlessly. “Deep. Romantic.” She wet her lips again, grunting as she curled her toes. “I’m close. I’m coming...”

“I can see,” Tinker said quietly. There was an odd sensation on Cinah’s upper thigh, and she looked down to see Tinker’s hand passing through the other side of her leg 

“Did you try to touch me...?”

“I’m not sure what I was thinking.”

“Do it again. Slower... higher.”

Tinker put her hand over the crotch of Cinah’s panties and pressed firmly. There was a wave of static electricity, a tingling akin to standing too close to an energy field, and she felt her skin erupt in gooseflesh as Tinker held her hand in place. Cinah arched her back and cried out as her orgasm was intensified by the buzz. Her body went rigid in the sling of her hammock, and tears rolled from her eyes as she pushed ineffectually at Tinker’s hand.

“Move, move, move it now, move...”

Tinker removed her hand, and Cinah was able to relax. She inhaled sharply to catch her breath and stared blindly at the curved ceiling above her head. It was actually the nose of the core, the piece of the ship that led their way through the nothingness. If the material had been transparent she could have stared out into a thick, deep nothing as she waited for her body to regain its normal rhythms.

“That was a very unique experience, Cinah.”

“I’m glad you think so. I didn’t know you could be that, ah, interactive.”

“Nor did I.” She put her hands behind her back and looked down toward Cinah’s feet. Cinah brushed one foot over the calf of the opposite leg and smiled when Tinker looked away. “Shall I continue the story?”

“No. I think I’m ready for bed.”

“Very well. Pleasant sleep, Cinah.”

Cinah nodded. “And a pleasant...”

Tinker said, “Period of inactivity.”

“Right. A pleasant evening to you as well.”

Tinker bowed in acknowledgement, then flickered out of sight. Cinah put her hands behind her head and closed her eyes, drifting off as she wondered what effects Tinker’s hand would have on other parts of her body.


	4. Chapter 4

They had passed through the storm, and the heat was making a triumphant return in its wake. Occasional cool breezes helped, the moisture in the air helping to cut through the worst of the burn, but Cinah was still dripping sweat. She wasn’t accustomed to this level of constant heat. There were always gelpacs and central air available. She didn’t know how people survived before they could simply slip into a coolant suit to take the edge off the temps. She paused to take off her goggles and massaged the points where they had started digging into her face.

“You know, you never... answered me. Or acknowledged what I said. I finally admitted that I’m in love with you, and you just did your... typical bullshit thing. That’s rude. I think that’s very rude.” She scanned the horizon and waited for a reply. “Are you not speaking to me now? Is that it? You think shunning me will make me stop loving you? I got news... ignoring me just makes me feel it stronger. So come on. Give me some kind of acknowledgement.”

“West.”

Cinah rolled her eyes. “Brilliant. I got a pouting avatar on my hands. Maybe I should hand you over to the scavengers if you’re going to be this way.”

“Don’t.” Then a second later. “Please.”

“Tink, I was... I was just kidding. You’re frustrating me. I would never do that to you. But please, you have to talk to me. Activate visual mode.”

“No.”

“Tink...”

“Energy reserves, low.”

Cinah stopped and looked at a random spot in the middle distance. “What? How low?”

“Dangerously.”

Cinah’s heart pounded against her ribs. “If you go flat, how... how bad would that be?”

“Dire.”

For a moment Cinah heard it as “die,” and her heart clenched. “We can’t let that happen. How low are you?”

“Diagnostic not available.”

“No,” Cinah whispered. If there were unavailable subroutines, if she couldn’t do something as simple as a self-exam, then it had to be in single digits. At that rate of decay, the hub would be nothing more than a stone. “No, I c... you can’t die on me, Tinker Bell.”

“No choice.” Five seconds passed. “No battery life. No recharge.” Ten seconds. “You were an excellent Core Diver, Cinah Tesser. You were a... friend. I am... glad... you... loved me.”

Cinah tore off her goggles, pushed her turban off her head, and spun to face the storm they had just ridden out together. If the scavengers grabbed them, they would recharge the hub. They would never let something so valuable just die. And once Tinker was up to full power, they could find a way out of the prison together. She took one step back the way they’d come before she realized how foolish she was being. She dropped to her knees in the sand, arms around the satchel.

“Don’t die, Tinker Bell. Not after all I’ve done for you, you ungrateful bitch. I take you on a nice walk through the desert and you have to go and die on me just because there’s nowhere to...” Her voice trailed off. “Plug you in.” She tore open the bag, pushing the sides of it down over the hub as she placed it in the sand. She ran her fingers over the sides and popped open the service hatch on the side.

“What?” Tinker said, her voice almost a whisper.

“Saving you. Again. Thank me later.”

She took out two wires, then reached up and stroked her temple mount. It was tied into her central nervous system, drawing off her brain’s neural energy to stay charged. Soldiers and crew members couldn’t exactly be expected to plug in their heads every few hours to juice up, so some scientist had manufactured the mounts in a way that made them self-sufficient. She flipped open the top, reached into the parts that were expressly not user-serviceable, and found the two nodes where she could plug in. 

“NO.”

The word was spoken so loudly it seemed to echo off the amphitheater of her skull. She ignored it and pressed the hubs contacts in, wincing at the initial spark of contact. The temple mount hummed loudly, and she caught a distinctive whiff of burning metal as lights on the hub suddenly flared to life. She kept her breath steady and, on her slow exhale, a spike of pain shot through her right eye. She collapsed around the hub as if protecting it from the sun with her body, trembling violently. It felt as if her brain was on fire, penetrated by rusty nails and thumbtacks. The pain was unbelievable, like an imp settled on her back and shoving its fingers through her skull.

The world ceased to be. Solid objects were replaced by hazy ghosts shapes, gaseous forms that swam around her head. She smelled ozone and burning plastic, she felt her insides convulse, and finally she felt sand beneath her, the sun pounding down on her shoulders, the superheated wind blowing against her, and she realized the pain was over.

She remained hunched over, trembling through the aftershocks of her foolish maneuver, a line of drool dangling from her bottom lip before plummeting down to the sand beneath her.

“What have you done?” Tinker asked, true anger in her voice.

“Ah thayffed yah laff.”

“I have no life! I never did. Please, Cinah. Please, I cannot bear to see you hurt further for what is essentially a lost cause. You must stop this, for my sake.”

Cinah hugged the hub. “Whaa ‘oo yoo cah? Why... d-do... you care?” 

“Because...” Tinker’s voice was softer now. “Because... I care for you as well.”

The left side of Cinah’s mouth rose in a smile. “Oo loff me.”

“That would be impossible.”

“You... love me.”

“I’m incapable.”

Cinah grunted as she got her feet under her and stood up. “Fine. Be tha’ way.” She worked her tongue around in her mouth, trying to figure out why it felt so alien. 

“Allow me to run a diagnostic on your vitals. Please.”

“Knock oorself owt.”

Tinker was silent for a moment. “Open your right eye, please? I would like to test your vision.”

Cinah tried, tried again, then reached up and touched her face just next to her eye. She blinked and felt the eyelashes against her fingertip as the eye opened and closed.

“Oh. I... gueth ah can’t see out of tha’ eye anymoh.”

“Cinah...”

“Jus' a short in th' temple mount.”

“It was never designed to handle this much energy. Cinah, you are not capable of supporting an entire hub.”

Cinah said, “It’th temporary.”

“The brain damage will be permanent!”

“Just haff to get to the settlement.” She lifted both legs to make sure they worked properly before she started forward again. “Get help.”

“If you die...”

“Den the power thour-- damn it. Power. Source... will be cut off. The hub will go dark. You’ll be safe.”

“And you’ll be dead.”

“And so will you. So... you know... it balances out.”

Tinker said, “Cinah. I love you, too.”

Cinah sighed. “Thank you for saying it. Took you long enough.”

#

Once a year the Scatter was taken in for a spruce-up, allowing techs to get in and fix any middling problems that had arisen or to upgrade the tech as necessary. During these exams, the crew was at liberty to vacation anywhere they wished (within reason, of course). Cinah was always at least a little cold when they were in space and, while she preferred the chill, she rarely had the opportunity to truly sweat and feel heat. She chose a quaint little town on the shore of a South American country, somewhere far away from the tourists and quite near the equator, and settled in for three days of sun and sand.

She dressed in cut-off sweatpants and a red bikini top, straying down to the sand but avoiding the water. Floating in space was one thing, but to actually fight an undercurrent or a riptide? That didn’t sound like her idea of a good time. So she relaxed in the sun, she read books - real, bound books with pages and covers - and slept. She was dozing on a chaise, partially aware of the beach bunny who had been summoning up the courage to approach her, when there was a small buzz that sounded as if it was coming from inside her skull.

“Tinker?” She opened her eyes and propped herself up on her elbows. Tinker’s avatar was projected into the sand at the foot of her chair, unobscured by the lenses of her sunglasses. “Is there a problem on the ship?”

“No,” Tinker said. “There are technicians in your work space.”

“I know. They’re supposed to be there. They just want to make sure everything is working properly. We’ve done this before, Tink.” She looked at the beach bunny, bronzed and brunette, smiling when she realized she’d been caught staring. Cinah lifted her hand in a friendly greeting. “Are they shoddy? Do you want to file a report with their supervisors?”

“That’s not necessary. They are operating with efficiency.” She looked to her right, following Cinah’s gaze. She set her jaw when she saw the bunny gathering her things. “I apologize. I was unaware I was interrupting.”

“You’re not... if there’s an issue, it should be addressed.”

Tinker shook her head. “It’s nothing you should be bothered with.”

The brunette approached, tilting her head so that her hair fell across her right shoulder. “Hi. Sorry, I don’t want to interrupt. Were you speaking to someone?”

Cinah forced herself to remain calm in the face of the gorgeous, sweat-beaded, half-naked woman’s Australian accent. “Just my ship’s avatar. I’m a Core Diver.”

“Well...” The girl sat on the edge of the chaise and lifted her shoulder so she could coyly look at Cinah over it. “Where else do you dive?”

Cinah grinned.

The girl’s name was Polly, and she was an enthusiastic partner. They brought on twilight together, and a storm rolled in off the sea as if their thrusting and harmonious cries equaled some sort of primitive rain ritual. When they were finished with each other Polly departed with a lingering kiss on Cinah’s lips and her phone number written on a card “just in case.” Cinah lay tangled in the sheets and caught her breath, let the sweat on her body evaporate, and hoped they had time to reconnect before she was called back to the ship.

When she did make it back, Tinker seemed oddly distant. She checked the program and code to make sure the technicians hadn’t done anything to her settings and then finally just asked.

“Tinker? Is everything okay?”

“Conditions are optimal.”

Cinah rolled her eyes. “That’s not what I asked. What’s up with you?”

“My programs were updated, so I’m running more smoothly than I was before you left.”

“Well, I...” She thought for a moment. “Is that why you’re pouting? Because I left?”

Silence from the LIA. 

“Is it because I left, or because of what I did when I left?” She smiled. “Tink, are you jealous?”

“That is a useless emotion in humans, let alone in a program. Don’t be ridiculous.”

Cinah laughed and patted a console. “Don’t worry, Tinker Bell. You’re the only girl for me. I might wander a bit but I’ll always come back to you. Trust that.”

#

“Tell me what you’re seeing.”

Tinker paused. “No.”

Cinah shook her head and trudged forward. The settlement was visible ahead of them, far enough away that it was still enshrouded in heat vapors off the sand, but close enough for the sensors on the hub to get a reading. If only she could get the damn interface to tell her what they were reporting. 

“I know we’ve had this breakthrough moment, but this is not the time to be stubborn, Tink. Just tell me what’s going on in the settlement.”

There was a long enough pause that Cinah nearly snapped again, but Tink finally responded. “Nothing. No activity, no life forms, nothing. Based on the readings I’ve compiled, it’s a seasonal camp, occupied only by those who work in the desert in the winter months. I’m so sorry, Cinah.”

“Why? It’s shelter. There might be food, they might have a radio in case of distress, and now I don’t have to worry about asking permission to use it.”

She was grateful that her speech seemed to have recovered following her self-lobotomy, but certain other functions were definitely suffering. Her left foot was dragging, and occasionally she noticed her right hand was clenched into a tight fist that only hurt when she tried to relax it. It was worth it when she looked down and saw the hub glowing through the bag, knowing it meant that Tinker was alive. 

“Got an estimated time of ahhravuh...” She grunted at herself. “Arrival?”

“At your current pace, you’ll reach the edge of the settlement in forty-five minutes.”

“Any sign of the scavengers?”

Tinker consulted her readings. “I’m detecting a large build-up of energy in the area where we crashed. I assume the scavengers are amassing troops to begin the hunt for us. Cin-cin, they’ll see this place and they’ll know you’re here. They’ll crash down around you from every direction and they will not be kind when you are their prisoner. You must know what is in store for you.”

“I do. And I know what’s in store for you, too. So thtop... schtop... s-top arguing with me. I’m not giving up on you, Tinker. I don’t care how much you harangue me about it. All this naysaying is going to come back and bite you. I’ll throw it in your face every time you tell me the odds or express any misgivings. ‘Well, I was right on the desert planet...’”

“Cinah...”

“I know,” she grunted. “Shut up and let me have the illusion, okay? Maybe once they see how well we work together, they’ll let you switch out your program for a new ship. I’ll make them see you aren’t just another avatar. You’re more than some LIA.”

Tinker said, “Not to them. They won’t be able to see me, Cin-cin. They’ll never hear my voice or understand what you’re saying. If you insist, they’ll take you off active duty for becoming delusional. If you insist that you’ve made an emotional connection to your LIA, they will call you a fool. They will shake their heads in disappointment and point to this excursion as a delusional break.”

Cinah closed her eyes behind her goggles.

“There is no way out of this in which I survive. I am so sorry, Cinah.”

“Just... sing, okay? For the last little bit of this walk, can you please just sing?”

“There’s a cat in the leaves and it sticks to her fur  
As she runs and she struts and she pounces...”

As the song continued, an autumnal ballad that went from the cat to the bare trees to the heavy gray clouds, and Cinah instantly understood she was trying to evoke a feeling of fall so Cinah could at least fool herself into feeling cold. She smiled and tugged the turban lower on her head, the wires connecting her to the hub sticking out from underneath it as she continued slogging on toward the oasis she now knew was empty.


	5. Chapter 5

Cinah opened her canteen, twisted off the top, and poured just enough into her mouth to keep her lips and tongue wet. Her body ached for more but she somehow managed to screw the top back on. She tucked it into the waistband of her shorts and continued on. She could see the edge of the town, the series of squat stone structures that formed a broken wall along its edge. Her limp was more pronounced now, her foot leaving long ditches in the sand behind her. 

“I haven’t said thank you,” Tinker said.

Cinah grunted in response. She was sick of slurring her words and struggling to enunciate, so she had stopped trying. She kept her head tilted so her left eye was faced forward, her useless right eye still blind and useless to her. 

“Energy signatures from the crash site indicate the scavengers have begun their search. They’re above the cloud layer and scanning. It’s over, Cinah. You fought harder than anyone could have expected you to, but there’s no salvation.”

“Shut.” She swallowed the lump in her throat, pressed her lips together, and jutted out her chin. “Up.” She inhaled through her nose, the hot air scorching her sinuses as she finally entered the settlement. Or outpost, she supposed would be a more accurate term. The buildings formed a ring around a central building that appeared to be some sort of lab. There weren’t many opportunities for hiding. “When... will they... get here?”

“Soon. Very soon, Cinah.”

She straightened her posture and looked at the building. “We’ll hide in there,” she said, knowing full well it didn’t come out sounding anything like that. “Go low, hide in the bowels until the scavengers get tired of looking for us.”

“They’ll never stop, Cin-cin. They know we’re here, they know you have my hub, and they won’t stop looking for us. Your tracks will lead them directly to you.”

Cinah crossed the courtyard of crushed stone. The windows were all shuttered too securely for her to get in, and the main entrance was set in a recess that had filled with windblown sand. She circled the building until she found a ladder enclosed in a circular metal framework. She jumped for the bottom rung and caught it on two fingers, crying out at the pain in her shoulder. She wasn’t accustomed to fighting against gravity in situations like this. Climbing was a matter of pressing flattened hands against smooth walls and letting yourself drift. This was agony, but she had to do it. She pulled herself up and climbed as new rivers of sweat began pouring down over the layer that already coated her skin.

“How can I help?” Tinker asked.

“Distract me.”

Tinker pondered for a moment. “There is something all LIA know but the information is locked behind a firewall. We are forbidden to ever reveal it, simply because it is not necessary for anyone to know. Seventy-six years ago when the LIA program was first created, scans were used to create the avatars. Male and female, every race represented. Those initial scans of the scientists who created the hub are still used as templates to create the avatars used today. Divers can, of course, tweak the specifics, but every face that becomes an avatar originates as one of the twenty-eight original bases.

“When you created me, my appearance was based on Avatar Program 7-b. That scan was of a holography designer from the primary Earth. She was thirty-six when she was scanned. Her name was Celina Singh. She was divorced and she had a child. I wish you could have met her. I wish you could have fallen in love with her, with someone capable of loving you back.”

“I don’t care about Celina Singh,” she said, her speech impediment turning the name into a sloppy jumble. “I care about Tinker Bell. LIA for the Scatter.” She found a door that hadn’t been sealed shut and forced it open with her shoulder. A stairway led down, deep into the bowels of the building, and Cinah allowed herself a sigh of contentment as she left the sun behind and entered the cooler shadows. The relief was mainly psychological; she knew the building was most likely just as hot as the outside, but the sun was off her back and there was a moment when she actually felt cool. She took a moment to close the door behind her and wedged the debris nearby against it so any pursuers would find it more difficult to follow them inside.

Tinker moved ahead, the glow of her projection lighting the way as Cinah followed her down. They reached the bottom as they heard the first sweep of engines passing by overhead, both women looking up as if they could see through the roof.

“That was just their first fly-by. They’ll see your tracks in the sand. They’ll return to investigate.”

“Then we should get deeper.”

Tinker looked at her and decided that arguing would be pointless. She turned and led the way deeper into the building. Cinah followed for a few steps, but her left foot hooked behind her right and she collapsed forward, skinning her palms on the hard concrete floor. She struggled to push herself up, grunting weakly as she looked down and saw her canteen had broken open. Water trickled from her hip into a pool on the ground.

“Damn it...”

“Cinah, get up.”

She considered the order, then shook her head and rolled onto her side. She pushed herself to the wall, sat up, and stretched her legs out in front of her. She exhaled and coughed from the exertion, but she wouldn’t have to do anything else. She was done. She folded her hands in her lap and closed her eyes.

Tinker said, “You honestly believe after everything you’ve done for me, I’m going to just let you sit down here and die?”

“No choice. Nowhere to go. Too late.”

Tinker whispered, “God damn you. This isn’t fair.”

“You have no concept of fair...”

“I do. You gave it to me. You showed me how to be in love and how to care. You walked across a desert for me. You changed me, Cin-cin. And now you’re just giving up. I can’t drag you. I can’t fight for you. So tell me what I’m supposed to do.”

Cinah took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Sing to me. Sit here by me. Sing to me.”

Tinker sat down against the wall, her shoulder touching Cinah’s. Cinah kept her eyes closed but she could feel the buzz of her presence. She’d grown accustomed to that static, and she smiled as she scooted closer to it. Tinker began to sing in a low voice, in a language that didn’t translate well to English, about a girl in a teacup ship riding a stormy ocean to her home. The song seemed endless, carrying on for eighteen verses with occasional recaps of what had come before, but Cinah didn’t care. She drifted in and out of awareness, her arms and legs jerking as she heard sounds of violence outside.

“Do scavengers fight each other?”

“No...” Tinker said. The music trailed off, her voice quietly curious. “Radio transmissions?”

Cinah forced her left eye open. Everything was hazy around the edges. “They talkin’ to each udder?”

“No... farther out. There...” She leaned forward suddenly. “The scavengers are engaged with salvage ships from the Swallowtail!”

“SOS,” Cinah said, hope swelling in her chest.

Tinker shook her head as she stood and turned in a slow circle. “They’re too far out and the walls of this bunker are too thick. I can only hear the dogfight because it’s happening right above us. I don’t have the power to boost a signal strong enough for them to get it.”

“Yes, you do.”

Tinker looked at her. “I can’t.”

“Take it. Or they take you.”

Tinker knelt down and cupped Cinah’s face. Her hands felt like sparks. “I love you, Cinah.”

“I love you, too.”

They kissed, human lips pressed against a mouth that didn’t truly exist. The energy made the small hairs on the back of Cinah’s neck stand up, and her lips felt numb as she parted them to sweep Tinker’s mouth with her tongue. It was like kissing a star, and she felt the charge all the way at the back of her throat. Tinker began drawing the power from Cinah, and she felt it like a yawning blackness stretching from her temple mount all the way down to the base of her skull, a spiral that enclosed her vertebrae until

 

“..send help...

...hurry...”

#

Her hair grew back during the coma, turning her shining dome into a shaggy mess. It was lighter brown than she remembered, and she politely asked the hospital doctor to cut it down as close as he could. In the days after she woke, she was poked and examined by surgeons specializing in both organic and cybernetic injuries. The damage to her ocular nerve was repaired with regeneration, and her vision returned after three months. Her temple mount was so overwhelmed that several of its contacts had completely melted. She had to withstand surgery to replace them, but the tech itself was left inside her head. She was visited by the Incident Review Board and gave her testimony about what had happened to the Scatter, detailed her trek across the desert to safety, and left out any and all reference to her conversations with Tinker Bell.

The hub was salvaged, but its power reserves were nil. The records were downloaded, and the device was dismantled and sent to Azimuth Labs where it would be recycled into completely new units. Cinah wept when she was told, curling up in her bed as she mourned the loss of a friend, a friend she had risked her own life to save only to have the entire thing be rendered moot when she was finally rescued. 

Her actions were put under review, and she was found to have shown great courage and fortitude in the face of great strife. She was given a commendation and promoted to Core Diver on the newest ship of the line: the Stellar Flame. She thanked the board and promised she would return to duty whenever she was called. Then she left and traveled to a destination she had found online.

Celina Singh’s memorial was a simple plaque on a stone plinth that was positioned so mourners was forced to look out over the ocean when they visited her. Cinah thought that was a beautiful touch, and knelt on the grass in front of the grave.

“I know you don’t know me. But I owe you my life. Thank you.” She kissed three fingers and pressed them against the carved name. “Thank you, Tinker Bell.”

Three weeks later, the Stellar Flame was ready for deployment. She took a transport up to the Birds’ Nest and stared out the glass at the ship that would be her new home. It was shaped like a forward-leaning flame, with two pointed waves curving up and out on either side with a third rising above the two and stretching further out. As her transport came around she realized it could also be seen as a chrome-and-silver rose lying on its side as it stretched toward the light. Either way, her home would be the core that ran through its base. 

Unlike the Scatter, the Stellar Flame’s core was attached to the main body of the vessel. She would be able to leave, mingle, and interact with the rest of the crew without relying on a video screen. She was both intrigued and terrified at the prospect. She’d been alone for so long... well, alone with Tinker Bell. The idea of actually knowing the people whose lives depended on her was big.

She greeted the Captain and the rest of the command crew, a friendly group that she was now a part of, and excused herself to visit the core so she could get a feel for it.

She slid through the hatch, leaving behind gravity for weightlessness, and she allowed herself to sink in a direction that had moments ago been sideways. She kept her eyes closed to orient herself in the new world, spinning to look at the screens, keyboards, tool cubbies, and panels that she now had to work with. The Stellar Flame was much more advanced than the Scatter, and she was excited to know she wouldn’t have to deal with quite so many patches or work-around solutions.

She opened the main panel and entered her access code. When the prompt for LIA came up, she took out a cable and plugged it into her temple mount.

“Okay. Moment of truth. If that is you in there, if I really am feeling a part of you that got left behind, now’s the time to make yourself known. Just try to spare my eye this time, huh?” She plugged the other end of the cable into the machine and held her breath as the program loaded. A prompt for personalization came up, and Cinah tapped her temple mount. The screen flashed ‘Restoration in Progress’ and she allowed herself a moment of excitement as the progress bar filled.

The body of her avatar was birthed as it had before, a female form curled in on itself. If it worked, no one would have to know. She could claim she had simply chosen the same name for her new avatar for the sake of familiarity. Her mouth was dry as she watched the dark eyes flutter open, the long limbs straightening, and the head slowly turned toward her. The expression was blank, but it was undeniably Tinker Bell’s face looking back at her. It meant nothing, she knew. It could simply be the Celina Singh template being used again.

“Hello.”

The LIA stared at her and then smiled. “Hello, Cin-cin.”

Cinah closed her eyes and barely stopped herself from sobbing. “Hi, Tink.”

Tinker Bell was examining the core when she opened her eyes again. “This is an impressive ship.”

Cinah nodded and took a spin with a ballerina’s grace. “Newest ship of the line. For my valor above and beyond the call of duty, I was entrusted with their shiniest toy. You’ll have the pre-preprogrammed LIA to use as a mentor if you need help with some of the unfamiliar things, and to learn how to properly work anything that’s been upgraded since you were created.” She alighted on one panel and looked back to see Tink floating after her. “Still, it could be a hairy honeymoon cruise. You up for it?”

“Of course. Do you not remember the time we were crash-landed in the desert, completely isolated, pursued by scavengers with no hope of survival?”

Cinah grinned so hard her cheeks hurt. “I do, as a matter of fact. Really happy to know you remember it as well.”

“How could I ever forget?” Tinker flickered out of view and reappeared on Cinah’s other side. “We should begin preparing the ship for launch.”

“Tink?” The avatar looked at her and Cinah smiled at her. “Welcome back.”

Tinker Bell’s smile was authentic, with real emotion behind it. The months she’d spent nestled in Cinah’s temple mount had given her a front row seat at a full gamut of emotions, and the expression seemed to come naturally to her now.

“It is very good to see you again, too.”

Cinah nodded and focused on her work. They needed to get the ship ready for launch, and Tinker Bell needed as much time as possible to familiarize herself with the tech that was far beyond what she was used to working with. It would be rocky at first, with her learning the ropes from the pre-stored LIA, but Cinah was confident they would be able to cover any turbulence through skill and savvy. 

Besides, they had plenty of time to work out the kinks. They had all the time in the world.


End file.
